Philadelphia's subsidy plan upholds idea of community

PHILADELPHIA — In those comfortless zones where vast public housing towers once stood, casting long shadows over whole neighborhoods, you can once again find normal-size streets and normal-size houses.

The houses look the way people expect them to look, with red-brick fronts and gracious entrances.

More important, they feel like real homes. There are carpets in the living rooms, wood cabinetry in the kitchens, and closets in the bedrooms.

Philadelphia is now deeply into the second chapter of its rocky history of government-subsidized housing. So far, the results are as different from the postwar era's concrete jungles as huts were from caves.

The most obvious change is the architecture. Over the last decade, the Philadelphia Housing Authority has imploded most of its high-rise, high-density public housing, banishing a litany of notorious projects along with their modernist towers. In their stead, the authority has built low-rise, low-density homes that mimic the city's traditional rowhouses and twins, right down to their decorative Victorian cornices and wood-railed front porches. They come with amenities that previous public housing tenants never imagined, such as air-conditioning and dishwashers.

At the same time, the authority has reconfigured the most fundamental notion of public housing. As director Carl Green likes to repeat, "It's no longer the housing of last resort." Nor is it housing for the chronically poor.

To avoid creating the economic ghettos of the past, new developments are required to include people with a range of incomes, from the single mother enrolled in a job-training program to the married wage-earners who staff the service jobs in the city's hotels and hospitals. Nearly 20 percent of the houses in each development are set aside for sale at subsidized rates, from $95,000 to $120,000. In two complexes -- Martin Luther King and Falls Ridge -- the authority is even hoping to sell some units at market prices, for as much as $400,000.

It is a noble experiment, but one with a big question mark hanging over it. Will people who can afford to buy a $100,000 home agree to live side-by-side with renters paying as little as $50 a month for the same house? The housing authority is about to find out.

The early returns look encouraging. About 800 people have requested applications for the 150 sale units in the Lucien E. Blackwell Homes in West Philadelphia, where the Mill Creek towers used to stand. It's the first of the new PHA projects to put its houses up for sale. Eighteen buyers have been approved so far.

Abraham Keita was among the first. A native of Liberia who immigrated to Philadelphia six years ago, Keita put $1,000 down for a $115,000 house. It has four bedrooms and two baths, which makes it perfect for him, his wife, and their three young children. At that price, he said, it was impossible not to buy, even though he had to come up with an additional $4,000 for closing costs.

For the last few years, Keita, a manager for a delivery company, and his wife, a medical assistant, have been paying $552 in rent for a smaller house. Buying a Blackwell home will increase their monthly payment to $700, but they will start building equity. "I like that it's brand new," Keita said, "and that it has its own yard and a parking space."

Keita also likes the way the house looks, which is comfortably traditional. Designed by John Hayes of Blackney Hayes Architects, the brick-fronted house is reminiscent of West Philadelphia's gabled, late-19thCentury twins.

Philadelphia started building low-rise public housing years ago, but only recently have the authority's designs started to borrow heavily from the past. The rage for historical styles, which mirrors the taste in private housing, began when Henry Cisneros, the former head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, made common cause with the New Urbanists in an attempt to humanize public housing.

Residents of the old towers hated that the buildings looked different from the rest of Philadelphia. You could tell at a glance that the towers were public housing, and that made residents feel stigmatized. Today, Green said, the housing authority insists on designs that are virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding homes, except that they are generally smaller.

To make its new housing fit in, the authority also has worked hard to re-establish the old street patterns that were obliterated by the modernist plazas.